Suzie Miller’s Prima Facie is a tough act to follow. The scorching one-woman play about sexual assault stormed the West End in 2022, transferred to Broadway, and saw Jodie Comer deliver a career-defining performance that won her both an Olivier and a Tony Award.
Now, we’re back in the courtroom for its spiritual sibling, Inter Alia, with Rosamund Pike as Jessica, a Crown Court judge juggling the demands of work and family life. The parallels with Miller’s first play are undeniable: Justin Martin returns to direct, and once again, the script exposes how badly the law fails victims. But there are new concerns too: motherhood and all its worries, the manosphere, and the unspoken competitions that can exist within marriage.
There are echoes, too, of Netflix’s recent hit Adolescence, with both works probing how young boys are meant to navigate an increasingly toxic online world. But unlike Stephen Graham and Jack Thorne’s measured drama, Miller’s play occasionally veers into polemic. In what is mostly a monologue, Jessica speaks passionately about wanting to achieve better outcomes for female survivors of abuse. She feeds the audience facts: it is “a rare thing” to be convicted of rape, she tells us. In the heat of the legal arena, she’s determined to push back against the system’s many failures.
square ARTS Jodie Comer blazes with fury in sexual assault drama Prima Facie
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But from the beginning, we know what horrors are coming. Jessica has spent her son Harry’s life trying to wrap him in cotton wool and protect him from the world. She revisits scenes from his childhood: the moment she lost him in a playground, and another when she taught him to scream if a man touched him inappropriately. Using kitchen utensils as visual aids, she delivers an uncomfortable lecture about porn and the importance of consent. Still, despite the occasional “pat on the back” she gives herself for being a good, present mother, Harry, at 18, is accused of rape.
It is a stomach-churning watch, with Jasper Talbot as Harry physically unravelling in the play’s final scenes. Under Martin’s direction, the 100-minute, no-interval running time hurtles forward with gripping, taut intensity. Miriam Buether’s set opens up from a middle-class home to reveal a hidden darkness that feels unceasing. And at the centre is Pike: a force of nature. She never stops moving, keeping up with household chores as she talks, ferociously dashing from work to home and back again. Her heart breaks as everything she thought she knew about her child slips through her fingers. By the final blackout, the verdict is clear: this is a damningly topical and vital drama that needs to be heard.
At the Lyttelton Theatre at the National Theatre until 13th of September
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